We
have a summer cottage on a barrier beach here on Cape Cod. We installed
our Sun-Mar in 1998 and since then have helped 4 other cottage owners
switch over from old fashioned outhouses to your product.
You can see the old outhouse seat mounted on the wall of our "new" bathroom.

One of the features I like about the Sun-Mar non-electric unit is the fact that it uses no electricity or water which saves hundreds of thousands of gallons of water as well as no additional electrical loads. Our house runs on solar power for electricity so this is an important feature.

Mother Nature composts naturally and this product follows along this guideline. Our society has a crazy system of dirtying clean water with our waste, shipping it to a treatment plant, adding potentially deadly chemicals to "clean it up", and then put it back into our waterways again. This system is not an effective or efficient way to deal with our wastes. If we could get the idea of composting as THE way to deal with waste disposal we could save hundreds of thousands of gallons of water from going through the "business as usual" system.

I also wouldn't mind my photo that I am sending with this letter being used in your catalog. I tell all my friends about my system and give tours of my home so people can see the environmentally friendly items that do exist and can be incorporated into their homes. I put cedar closet boards behind the unit to help control possible odors/insect problems and decorated the stack air vent with a silk ivy garland to make it blend in better with the decor.

There are two full-time residents at our house so this unit works pretty well for our needs. Visiting friends and relatives are surprised there is no big odor problem and how simple the composting idea is.

The problem I see with most "new" or "different" environmentally friendly products is that society does not like change. We are used to the status quo and don't want to have to do things differently. Nor do we want to know what happens to our waste. A flush takes care of everything, we think. I urge people to take a tour of the sewer plants in their area and really see what happens to our resources. I try to encourage people to take some kind of responsibility for their wastes and this is one way they can do that. I haven't had anyone actually purchase one to date, and the most common answer is that they are very expensive compared to a standard system. Maybe if they had to pay their sewer bills out of their pocket instead of being hid in their tax bill, they might see the true cost and change their minds. That's what I hope for.

I will share my experience with one of your composting toilets (Excel-NE).

We love it. I have a remote cabin on the Owyhee Lake in the Eastern Oregon desert country where there is no electricity or running water except what I pump out of the lake. My wife and I built it in 1972, and also built an outhouse. In 1995 I added a 8' by 8' bathroom on the back of the cabin and installed the composting toilet and a shower stall.

With the outhouse my two daughters-in-law and my wife seldom went to the cabin, as they didn't really like the toilet facility. Now they all love to go to the cabin, as the composting toilet is just as nice as their own home plumbing. The bathroom is odorless, clean, and shiny looking, and they actually enjoy the novelty of such a neat facility. When adding the new bathroom, I also installed a Solar collector, 12 volt lights, a water pressure demand pump, a hot water heater(propane), and the new shower. I have to say the new little room on the back of my cabin with the Sun-Mar composting toilet made a big hit and we can't believe we got by without it for so long. Pictures follow. That is me standing on the deck at the entrance to the bathroom.

When my husband Jim and I retired to our hunting cabin in the Wisconsin Northwoods, we decided to simplify our lifestyle. He built a small building about 8' from our 25' by 25' A-frame, to use as a bathroom and shower house, and we installed the Excel-NE unit you see pictured.
In 4 years of daily use, we have had no problems with our composting toilet. In fact, we are delighted with it! There is absolutely no odor, to the surprise of our "downstate", city visitors. The compost is sprinkled near our plentiful trees, bushes and flowers and dug in to enrich our sand/clay soil. It improves our soil.

Thank you so much for your composting toilets! We have only a small wood burner to heat our cabin and cold water to the house, but that miraculous Excel-NE is a luxury we surely enjoy!

Yours Truly,
Pat & Jim Godsey

Models:Excel NE Installed 2001Location: Battle Ground, INReviewed By: Mike Margaret & Phillip Floyd
We have the Excel NE with the 12 volt fan option. We installed the Excel-NE per the instructions and it went well. We have been using the Excel-NE for about three weeks now and think it is great, no odor, no fuss, no water. I am 56 years 5' 6" Margaret is 54 and 4' 11" the step was the only thing we were not sure about, but it has not been a problem at all. And after all we can feel better about not running the pump or using all that water. We should have done this years ago.